Saturday, January 21, 2012

'My interests arise from the boundary between what we call natural and artificial. I observe the physical and social environment in detail, to find hidden beauty and peculiarity-- things such as a cell phone antenna in the shape of a pine tree, birds that are not native to the area, or moss growing in a crack of cement sidewalk.

The nature I notice survives in different forms, by adapting, adjusting and mutating to its new urban setting. This manipulated urban nature strongly influences my recent works. I emphasize the subtle details of surviving nature and exaggerate their illogicality to cultivate my own version of invented creatures and landscapes. My world is not a creation of total imagination, but is a projection of the reality in an absurd form.'

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Artist Lee Baker used 10 thousand metres (or 32,808 feet) of colourful yarn to create his fascinating work ‘Refractive Monolith’. Commissioned by The Future Tense for its SPECTRA I exhibition, the piece utilizes the corner of the gallery to showcase vibrant acrylic strands pulling across a grey gradient pyramid and stylized graffiti-like clouds. A three dimensional reaction to his paintings, Baker explains the installation as the quest to use “vivid colour and extreme perspectives to ‘build’ fantastical meta-cities against a stormy backdrop of ashen clouds and pending darkness”.